Leadership & Business

Are You An Idea Killer?

My new Inc. column, entitled Beware of the Idea Killers is out and focuses on how new ideas are what will help your business remain competitive. However, be sure you aren't killing them before you consider bringing them to fruition.

As Innovation remains a hot topic in 2008 and as executive teams continue struggling to build effective, sustainable, and measurable innovation programs. The battleground becomes how to structure innovation departments, drive company-wide innovation initiatives, and sustain efforts over the long haul.

To help executives with these challenges my company, Breakthrough Management Group (BMG) is hosting a 2-day Executive Seminar February 25-26 in Denver, CO, entitled Chief Innovation Officer: Lead Your Company’s Growth and Innovation Efforts.

This is the third CIO course for BMG.  We hosted two similar events in 2007, each time heralding attendees from industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and financial services into one room to discuss and learn about what they all have in common – the need to better drive growth and innovation in order to compete in the future. Past attendees include, Levi Strauss, AVNET, Circuit City, NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation and GE Energy to name a few.

If you are interested in Innovation and what it really takes to lead your company to the forefront, I highly recommend this course. More information can be found here.

Innovation and Improvement: A Distinction Without a Difference

My newest column is up on Inc.com. It talks about how the processes of innovation and improvement are much more intertwined then we generally like to believe.

I would be interested in your comments and thoughts on the subject.

My company is now offering a new and "innovative training course", the first of its kind...Innovation Tools for Black Belts.  Held in Denver, CO Oct. 8-12, this course is specifically designed for Six Sigma and Lean practitioners, the class teaches a number of powerful Innovation tools in the context of BMG's Structured Innovation methodology, D4.

A five-day course, attendees have the opportunity to work on a real business issue with guidance from BMG’s innovation experts; teaching participants a solid, repeatable and predictable process for innovating new products, processes and business models. The first course will be taught by Dr. Phil Samuel, my co-faculty for BMG's upcoming Chief Innovation Officer seminar to be held in Denver, CO  Oct. 1-2, 2007.

I highly recommend it so check both courses out!

Don't Waste Your Innovative Efforts

Just the other day I read a press release titled, “Consulting Firm Warns Companies Not to Overuse Lean and Six Sigma.”  I laughed—for about five minutes.  And then I had an image of this consultant’s next announcement:  “Consulting Firm Warns People Not to Overeat.”   In fact what I really wanted to do was throw the bullshit flag (if you don't know what it is, go to www.bsflag.com).

As I laughed, I supposed that if you want to make your mark by warning others not to overuse something, you can pitch yourself as an expert at just about anything.  Because you don’t have to be an expert—at anything—to know that over use or under use means anything but proper use.

Let’s be serious though.  Anyone reading this has at least a fleeting understanding of the principles of Lean and Six Sigma.  Many of you could be considered experts in your own right.  So you’re probably laughing, too.

But beyond a good laugh, we all have a responsibility to ourselves and our companies to push for proper use.  In fact one of the words that underlies Six Sigma is “optimization” which is just a fancy word for “proper use” when it comes to a business process.  In Six Sigma we look to optimize everything—even the use of Six Sigma. So a good implementation of Six Sigma would focus on just the right amount of effort going into six sigma—not too little and not too much.

My Ink in Inc.

Inc. has added me to their roster of thought leaders and I will contributing on a monthly basis. My first column is titled It's All About Convergence -- The convergence of many approaches to business process improvement is the key to remaining successful in today's environment. Check it out and let me know what you think.

TRIZ Continues to Take Root

Last week I was interviewed by Innovation Tools’ Chuck Frey about INsourcing Innovation, and how TRIZ can be used to provide structure and direction to a company’s innovation initiatives.

If you’re interested in reading the full interview, you can find it here

Talking About Ambidextrous Organizations

Earlier this month, Dan Keldsen of The Delphi Group and I set aside some time to talk about INsourcing Innovation, and the performance excellence tools a company can use to become a really outstanding organization.

Feel free to listen in here.

Innovation, yes! But How?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Business books I pick up in the airport, all the mainstream magazines (Fast Company, Fortune, Industry Week, etc.), trade publications – and yes, even blogs. And there’s one theme I’ve been reading about with increasing frequency – innovation.

Then there’s the enormous number of companies that have something in their taglines that point to innovation, either directly or indirectly (look at GE, Motorola, Siemens and so many others).

So here’s what’s troubling me: no one talks about “how” to innovate. Sure, they talk about how important it is. They talk about how it is driving their business strategy. They talk about changing business dynamics, providing more value, beating the competition and so on. But no one is talking about HOW to innovate.

The overwhelming majority of innovation consultants are tilted toward helping companies with the softer side of culture building. But it’s the harder side that challenges companies, perhaps more so. It’s the real product and service barriers – the “technical barriers” – that stand so prominently in the way of true market-changing breakthrough.

Creativity + structure = innovation success
Gone are the days of neon colored walls and pinball machines in the cafeteria, all designed to foster a more “creative” environment. Seems to me that these programs just created new ways to spend investors’ money. Today we need reliable, predictable and replicable approaches to innovation – not loosy goosy ones.

This demands a new approach—or at least an approach that’s new to most of us. To be reliable, predictable and scaleable (another word for replicable), we need to follow the same rules we follow for everything else expected to exhibit success. Basically we need a process and a methodology for innovation.

In a recent edition of Business Week Online, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said “I look at Six Sigma as a foundation on which you can build more innovation.” Right on, I say. We need more structure to innovation, without sacrificing the necessary soft side – just like Six Sigma brought structure to quality improvement in the same way.

Immelt would agree that Six Sigma works best when it’s deployed through a structure and under conditions that build improvement culture along with improvement skills.  It appears he’s also saying that Six Sigma is a great stepping stone or springboard for Structured Innovation.

Innovation is for all to learn and do
I recently completed a book entitled Insourcing Innovation. I wrote it with some colleagues because the achievement of continuous innovation is dependent upon certain “critical Xs,” as we say in the Six Sigma world. It’s not enough to state the goal (innovation). You have to define the chain of causation that enables you to achieve your goal.

It's Time to Insource

As is typical of American industry, once again we’ve allowed the pendulum to swing too far.  That’s ok.  We just have to recognize when it happens.  It’s our nature to be passionate, even if sometimes passion leads to irrational exuberance, to use a new cliché.

This time the pendulum that’s swung too far is the one that says “outsourcing” on it.  That’s all you read about: outsource to China, outsource to India, even outsource domestically. But given all the failures and unmet expectations, it’s time to reel in the irrational outsourcing exuberance and “insource” what matters most.

Just ask Dilbert
A cartoon depicts Dilbert walking into a colleague’s office saying, “I have some disturbing news. We outsourced our customer service function to India a few years ago. Apparently they subcontracted the job to Mexico. Then Mexico subcontracted to Vietnam, who subcontracted to the Philippines, who subcontracted to the US.”

The cartoon continues with the employee saying, “It turns out that we are the lowest-cost provider because we lie about our hold times. In summary we pay ourselves to hose ourselves.” Then the employee asks his boss, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” The boss says, “We should raise our prices?”

Actually, like many of Scott Adam’s Dilbert strips, this one is a little hard to follow. Sometimes he hits the business world square in the head with startlingly truthful wisdom, while other times he skitters around the fringe of business reality with the acumen of a third grader.

But somewhere in the cartoon are a few good truths. One is that projects can and do get outsourced down more than one or two levels. Two, companies that outsource often end up hosing themselves. Three, we might do ourselves and our companies way more good by adding value (features/innovation), keeping certain work in house and raising our prices – especially now that we’re moving away from the same recessionary scarcity that sparked the first wave of outsourcing in the early 1990s.

Call Center Crazy
Take the commonly cited call center. It seems to me that in certain industries it might be time to invest in a system of service that revolves around real people, speaking clear-headed English, who are bright, lively and ultra capable of making a customer happy. We’ve got all this rhetoric about The Customer Experience, One to One Marketing and the like. Yet we can’t find anyone who can foster real Customer Loyalty by bonding with customers, regularly.

One thing’s for sure. People in India and China probably don’t know a whole lot about how to bond with your customers, as a rule.

Having said that, call centers still may be the perfect candidates for outsourcing, and we just need to outsource better. Or the companies who provide such services need to do so better, faster and cheaper. I really don’t know because I’m not a call center expert; if you are, I’ve probably lost you because you believe deeply in the reasons for why the entire customer service industry is in the can.